Women's Protection Units

The Women's Protection Units (YPJ) was an all-female Kurdish military organization and one of the two armed wings of Rojava, established in 2012 at the start of the Rojava conflict of the Syrian Civil War. With a strength of 7,000-10,000 female soldiers, the YPJ sought to advance the perceptions about women in Middle Eastern Muslim culture, and the YPJ fought with the same ferocity as their male counterparts in the YPG during the war on the Islamic State. In a region where women were repressed, the YPJ were hailed as feminists, and they proved that women could fight just as well as men.